Medical Acupuncture Service

Acupuncture is a form of traditional Chinese medicine that dates back more than 2,000 years. It's performed by professionally trained clinicians who insert tiny, hair-thin needles through the skin into underlying tissues at strategic points in order to ease pain and treat many diseases.

Acupuncture is also often used along with other forms of treatment to provide the best pain relief possible. Adding acupuncture sessions to conventional therapy for headaches may achieve comparable results as medication alone, while decreasing side effects from medications. Similarly, post-operative acupuncture can reduce the nausea and vomiting caused by narcotic painkillers.

Our approach

The Medical Acupuncture Service is part of the Department of Anesthesiology, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital. Our doctors are fully licensed in Western medicine and also have thorough training in acupuncture as a specialty practice. The service provides care for children and young adults to help them manage a variety of acute and chronic pain as well as non-pain-related illnesses through acupuncture. We offer services though our inpatient facility at the Boston Children's Longwood Campus and our outpatient Medical Acupuncture Clinic at Boston Children's Waltham location. The majority of patients come weekly for four to six weeks.

Related Clinical Services

We are grateful to have been ranked #1 on U.S. News & World Report's list of the best children's hospitals in the nation for the fourth year in a row, an honor we could not have achieved without the patients and families who inspire us to do our very best for them. Thanks to you, Boston Children's is a place where we can write the greatest children's stories ever told.